Examples include “Flaubert’s Parrot” (1984), which sets us on the hunt for the stuffed bird that inspired the author of “Madame Bovary” and the mosaic-like “A History of the World in 10½ Chapters” (1989), which offers alternative accounts of Noah’s Ark and the Chernobyl disaster. Barnes has always enjoyed playing with form and style, the porous border between fiction and nonfiction. What this information is doing in the middle of a novel is quite another matter, but Mr. We are invited to consider various aspects of his creed and personality, not all of which can be gleaned from Wikipedia. Barnes that Julian reigned for a mere two years (from 361–363), that he “never set foot in Rome” and that he was born and baptized a Christian. Barnes’s book is arranged over three parts, and its middle 50 pages take the form of an essay on the life, legacy and contradictions of this “bogeyman” of Christianity, the post-Constantine emperor who declared himself a pagan and (as Swinburne has it) died on the Persian battlefield lamenting Jesus’ triumph: “Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean.” We are reminded by Mr. “Elizabeth Finch” is another novel with Julian at its core-quite literally.
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